The 64.5 Mustang, aka Mousoleum, was driven out of the garage, aka Mouse-Majal without having to tinker with the engine. The swather volunteered its new battery, a little gas was poured into the carbourator to prime the system, and she fired right up! The rotten tires were replaced with 4 used studded snowtires at $10per- good enough to roll out of the garage and get cleaned up. 30 mummified mice and all their mess filled two garbage bags, the shop-vac twice, and took a good deal of bleach and soap to exhume.

My ’95 pony lost the “nicest convertible top” portion of the show. But on a blue-highway section of Montana she did school a pair of Porches that were travelling together- flat outpowered a 196? Porshe356 that tried to keep me from passing, and lost the accompanying lead Porshce 911 convertible in a canyon. Not that it was the 911’s fault- I would love to have traded cars for that stretch as my old gal is pretty soft in the corners, even with additonal welded undercarriage framing.

Real pony rides are even better than sporty cars. Rudy and I had a great time bringing in the herd for vaccinations and weighing. He is sporting my dad’s newly refurbished saddle. He loves to move cattle, and is an athletic and smart fellow to work with.

The calves are separated from their mothers, and none to happy about it. They will be run through the chutes and given two vaccination shots, get a splash of worm meds on their back, and step onto a scale- it is on the dark side of twilight when we finish up and reunite them with their mothers.

The cows await reunion with their calves in the middle corral. The lawn is freshly mowed, as dad and I fixed the riding mower with a new starter motor and a fair amount of tinkering. The lawn had gone dormant in mid July- Aug, but greened up again with the Sept rain/sleet/snow.

Walkies are getting colorful. Yesterday Carmine and I brought down 3 more trees, and sectioned and split them- another cord of firewood for the wood-house. The bear that Carmine chased out of the yard on the 4th of July was just down the road from the house, browsing the berry bushes. We had two fellows come up and re-roof some small ranch buildings with steel (now every roof is steel), and I used the old cap of one old garage to re-cap another. I pulled the wheels from the old Mustang, they were the old tires I put on way back in High School and are too rotten to inflate any more- I had them replaced with used tires that will be good enough to roll it out of the garage and back. Maybe we can get the ol’ gal running.Today we start a new round of Chemo, with a new mix of Chemo. We thought we had finished up a month ago, but no such luck. We’ll be coming in once a week for the course of the new meds, for a timeframe that isn’t established. I bought Carmine a pack of 10 tennis balls and a new bag of dogfood, just to cover all the bases.

Can’t seem to let vox allow me to write between the images today.I cut down two big old lodgepole pine trees, filled the back of the truck with 6 foot sections, and drove back near the house to section them further. The cattle came and inspected my work. Silly girls…

I invested in a set of gray ink pens before heading out, and finally did some doodles during the rainy weekend (and last week…). The armless/headless Greek sculpture lives in Kansas City- a long way from the Mediterranean and a long when as well. I took picts of it last year and drew from the laptop. The torso gets a bit long on the front view, but that’s the fun of working in pen- there’s no going back. The pencil drawings are from June/July.The two below are from a series of picts experimenting with poses for the Orpheus & Eurydice commission. Those picts are back in SLC this trip out, buried in a box. These were fun to work out, as they are fairly intellectual works: intellectual drawings may sound a bit odd, but these pieces are more about the background knowledge of structure and exploring that knowledge.We had a small break in the weather on Friday afternoon and I took the truck up over the hill and brought down 4 trees with the chainsaw, sectioned them out, piled them in the old ranch truck, unloaded them, split them, and stacked them. That should keep the cold out for a while; it hasn’t snowed since last week, but the nights are getting down into the 30s.

We had 1.75 inches of rain in past few days, after about 6 weeks with no significant amount. We fired up the wood-burning stove yesterday to keep the chill out- our high temp at the ranch was 41.

It snowed for the better part of an hour yesterday, and actually stuck in the hills far above the ranch. On the drive to town today the Rocky Mountains, from the headwaters of the Missouri up to Canada, had a thick white blanket. The forested hills behind the ranch showed a lot of white as well.

The jungle-yard of June has laid down as a yellow brown dust- it
actually shrank since the last time I mowed it in July, but with all the rain
it has already greened up again.

We are in town today for an apres-Chemo scan, a radioactive “dye” is administered through an I.V. drip for an hour, then he is scanned. We get the results next Monday. ( they lost all the scans they did that day, and we had to rescan the next week, then get the results the following week- which came back positive: which meant another scan the following week- leading to more chemo the following week ie the last week of Sept.)

Meanwhile, Carmine is happy to be collar-free again and able to hike and run and swim as much as a dog can take, with out ever leaving her 1,600 acre yard.